Rishi Ahluwalia
Director Of Engineering
Mumbai
Summary
Dynamic engineering leader with a proven track record at Dream11, specializing in distributed systems and microservices. Expert in driving high-performance teams, optimizing costs, and enhancing product quality through innovative solutions. Skilled in Java and AWS, with a strong focus on mentorship and strategic decision-making to achieve exceptional results.
Overview
13
13
years of professional experience
Work History
Director of Engineering
Dream11
07.2025 - Current
- Headed a 30-engineer season-long fantasy organization, solving deep customization challenges by decoupling game logic into reusable platform services, unlocking rapid feature experimentation, and multi-tenant fantasy configurations.
- Owned delivery of Watch Parties (real-time audio/video use cases) by leading a 20-member cross-functional team, driving build vs. buy decisions, vendor onboarding, and cost optimization negotiations.
- Established an LLM-driven call quality intelligence system for audio/video use cases, transforming call transcripts into user-level quality scores that powered personalization and product decision-making.
- Led a structured evaluation of incident call-alerting platforms and surfaced GoAlert as the optimal fit over Opsgenie, unlocking approximately ₹2 crore in annual savings.
- Evaluated observability tooling for large-scale systems, focusing on cost sustainability, fast trace/span investigation, and precise ingestion governance.
Engineering Manager
Dream11
03.2023 - 07.2025
- Built and led a backend team delivering a multi-tenant Offers platform that supports offer lifecycle, cohort targeting, and ledger consistency, using configuration-based onboarding and usage-driven tenant isolation (shared or individual stacks), achieving 8M RPM at less than 20 ms latency on AWS, DynamoDB, and Java.
- Led contest-join promotion services at Dream11 scale, serving offers at 25M RPM with 99.9999999% availability through resilient, multi-fallback architecture, using Aerospike and Java.
- Owned IPL-scale readiness across the organization, ensuring 18M concurrency through rigorous service evaluations, SLO definition, runbooks, fire drills, and cross-team alignment.
Software Development Engineer III
Dream11
07.2021 - 03.2023
- Led design and code reviews for Multi-Match Fantasy and the paid season-long version of Seasonlong Fantasy, providing hands-on technical guidance and mentoring for engineers.
- Drove design discussions and established distributed systems best practices across several projects.
- Drove load and stress testing to identify bottlenecks and achieve high-throughput performance.
Software Development Engineer II
Dream11
02.2020 - 07.2021
- Built an application-sharded Booster service where active entities lived on MySQL hot shards, and inactive data was archived to MySQL cold storage, enabling scale-up/scale-down of hot shards without heavy rebalancing.
- Created a containerized testing framework for API and queue workflows, enabling local execution with mocked third-party dependencies.
- Managed multiple services, owned deployments, and maintained their uptime.
Software Development Engineer II
Sixt Rent A Car
03.2018 - 02.2020
- Contributed to development and maintenance of Damage and Repair workflows, leveraging Java and MySQL.
Senior Software Engineer
Practo Technologies
04.2017 - 10.2017
- Maintained Practo Ray BE Services
Software Engineer
Practo Technologies
01.2016 - 03.2017
- Contributed to development onf practo ray BE services.
Software Engineer
Cleartrip
02.2015 - 01.2016
- Contributed to the development of the hotel onboarding service.
Software Development Engineer
Amazon
03.2013 - 02.2015
- Contributed to the launch of the App Store developer onboarding journey services.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
VTU
Bidar 04.2001 -
Skills
Engineering Leadership
Distributed Systems
Mentorship
Microservices
Java
AWS
MySql
Kafka
Redis
Docker
Vertx
Timeline
Director of Engineering
Dream11
07.2025 - Current
Engineering Manager
Dream11
03.2023 - 07.2025
Software Development Engineer III
Dream11
07.2021 - 03.2023
Software Development Engineer II
Dream11
02.2020 - 07.2021
Software Development Engineer II
Sixt Rent A Car
03.2018 - 02.2020
Senior Software Engineer
Practo Technologies
04.2017 - 10.2017
Software Engineer
Practo Technologies
01.2016 - 03.2017
Software Engineer
Cleartrip
02.2015 - 01.2016
Software Development Engineer
Amazon
03.2013 - 02.2015
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
VTU
04.2001 -